Seeing as how I’ve announced all of my other life changes on this blog — the blog that got me hired at the Houston Press and began my new path as a real-life employed writer — it only made sense to return here after too many months away, to make another official announcement about the career I started four years ago.

A few weeks following my fourth anniversary with the paper and just a few months shy of my three-year mark as the food critic, I am stepping down from the Houston Press to explore a different path, both as a writer and now an editor.

By the beginning of June, I’ll be the Features Editor at Houstonia — our new metropolitan monthly — where I’m thrilled to be reunited with my old Press colleagues Cathy Matusow, John Nova Lomax and Robb Walsh. I owe a tremendous amount to both Cathy and Robb for being my editor and mentor, respectively, in a career I never thought I’d have. I’ve been tremendously lucky to have them both in my life.

I’ll miss my colleagues at the Press immensely, especially my editor-in-chief, Margaret Downing, who — not to be too cliche — took a chance on a wet-behind-the-ears kid with no writing experience and provided me with the guidance and education I so badly needed as a completely untrained journalist. This has been more valuable than any four years spent in any college (and I don’t owe the Press any student loans!).

As sad as I am to leave my home here at the Press behind, I’m excited to cultivate a new readership at a publication I respect equally. I think Houstonia will prove to be every bit as vital as our daily and our alt-weekly, filling a monthly niche that’s been wanting for passionate, discerning, thoughtful coverage — some of which I hope I’ll be able to provide as well. The team that Scott and Nicole Vogel have put together over there is amazing, and the chance to work among them will be humbling and inspiring.

Until June, I’ll still be at the Press, and taking suggestions as to the very last restaurant review I’ll write.

It’s rare for me to post here anymore. And it’s even rarer for me to post an event. I don’t recall posting a single one in recent memory. But I’d do just about anything for my good friend Jody.

Jody Stevens, also known as Jodycakes, is hosting an event tonight at 13 Celsius with Lucrece Borrego of downtown’s “Center for Culinary Entrepreneurship,” Kitchen Incubator, to talk all things cupcakes. The inaugural Houston Cupcake Meetup is an event for like-minded bakers to come and discuss matters from the trivial (cupcake crawls!) to the important (the Texas Cottage Food Bill; locating commercial kitchen and/or baking spaces in the city). Having navigated the city’s baking scene for years, Jody and Lucrece are just the women you want to talk to if you’re interested in baking for profit or just baking (and eating!) for fun.

The event starts tonight at 7 p.m. at 13 Celsius and the cover is $10. That $10 will net you a wine and cupcake pairing from 13 Celsius’ knowledgeable staff and Jodycakes herself. It will also likely net you some new friends and very useful contacts.

Hell, even if you aren’t a baker, there are few finer ways to spend your Wednesday evening than with wine and cupcakes. Trust me.

Over cocktails a few nights ago with a new friend, he asked me a question I’d never before considered: At what point did you realize that you were more “into” food than the average bear?

I had to stop and think about it for a moment. Back in high school, I was notorious among my friends for always dragging them to the latest hole-in-the-wall I’d found or force-feeding them sashimi back at a time when sushi wasn’t nearly as accessible or omnipresent as it is today. But finally it struck me: that moment, the one that my parents still tease me about to this day.

In elementary school, my class was planning a field trip to Galveston to visit the Elissa (typical Houston schoolkid journey, of course). And while the prospect of climbing all over the old ship was charming and all, my single-minded focus at 10 years old was where we were eating while we were down there. Surely we couldn’t drive all that way and not dine at some of the island’s best restaurants!Continue reading →

Only nine months into my job as the food critic at the Houston Press, I was nominated for a James Beard Award today for my “Designer Meats” feature. Considering the fact that only two years ago, I was working [somewhat miserably] in the human resources department of a cement company, I’m gobsmacked to say the least.

It’s especially ironic considering that the feature for which I’m nominated was one that caused an enormous ruckus (or so I’m told; none of the chefs interviewed have ever said a single word to me about it) in the dining scene when some of the charcuterie discussed in the article was destroyed by the Health Department. I didn’t know about this until quite a bit after the fact, and was distressed to hear that it had happened. Nevertheless, all of the chefs I spoke to for the feature were well aware of any possible risks in publicly discussing their charcuterie programs. And examining both sides of the issue is what makes a piece actual journalism as opposed to a one-sided fluff piece.

I’m still stunned and shocked to have been nominated for anything at all, and it’s all thanks to this wonderful video of Catalan’s Chris Shepherd butchering a pig. The feature was nominated in the “Multimedia Food Feature” category and it wouldn’t have been at all possible if Chef Shepherd hadn’t graciously allowed me into his kitchen and let me witness the fascinating act of breaking down an entire half a hog.

So to Chef Shepherd and all the chefs who participated in the feature — Ryan Pera of Revival Market, Justin Basye of Stella Sola, James Silk and Richard Knight of Feast — and to Robb Walsh, my fellow nominee and the man who brought me to the Houston Press in the first place…thank you. Of course, there wouldn’t have been a feature in the first place without my incredible editor Cathy Matusow, without whom I wouldn’t be half the writer I am, and the beautiful charcuterie photos from Troy Fields. And it wouldn’t even have been considered for a nomination if my awesome editor-in-chief, Margaret Downing, hadn’t believed it in enough to send it in. There are so many people involved in one piece and they all deserve to be thanked, repeatedly and profusely.

Thank you. :)

Stay tuned when I go to NYC in May to attend the awards ceremony, try to keep from vomiting every time I see a famous person and lose to Andrew Zimmern, because…really. It’s Andrew freaking Zimmern. It’d be an honor to lose to a man who’s eaten squirrel brains and lived to tell.

I was frustrated to see yesterday afternoon that some people – some very important people – continue to miss the point of the Foodie Backlash article I wrote last year for work. I’m more frustrated, frankly, that they continue to bring it up at all, their confused, wrong-headed vitriol only further muddying the initial point. If I don’t understand something, I either let it go or hash it out with someone until I do understand it.

To that point, I wrote this post initially for the Houston Press, then decided that it wasn’t entirely appropriate for the more casual tone of the blog and it went unpublished. But after yesterday, I chose to resurrect it. So here it is: my further explanation of the initial Foodie Backlash article, in hopes that I’ll at least be hated for my actual point instead of any wrongly perceived points.

In the Atlantic two weeks ago, B.R. Myers wrote in his piece titled “The Moral Crusade Against Foodies,” that “it has always been crucial to the gourmet’s pleasure that he eat in ways the mainstream cannot afford.”

And in that brief statement, Myers encapsulates the dark heart of the “foodie issue” as it were: using food as a status symbol in the same way that people use tools like fashion or music to separate themselves from the masses.

In a 2003 conference paper from the American Sociological Association, author Samantha Kwan put forth the idea that food is “no longer regarded as merely the satisfaction of a physiological need low on Maslow’s hierarchy. Rather, food consumption provides individuals a means for the conscious manipulation and display of self.”

Eight years later, it would be easy to go one step further and add to her theory that conspicuous consumption of the latest food trends constitutes identity work of its own, just as much as shoving your love of Ethiopian food in someone’s face does.

And this, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. Pursuing a hobby out of love for, say, Ethiopian food is one thing. Pursuing it purely for selfish reasons is another.

Quick crash course on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: “Identity work” is based on the idea that once you’ve satisfied all of your basic needs — the need for food and water, shelter, employment, friends and family and, finally, more elevated concepts like self-esteem and respect — you’ll seek to satisfy that ultimate goal: individuality, whether it’s expressed through clothing or cooking.

Recreation of a Roman triclinium.

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This is, by no means, the first time in history that large groups of people have sought to separate themselves from the masses through appreciation of fine or exotic foods.

More than 2,300 years ago, wealthy Romans were reclining on lecti triclinaris in elaborately appointed triclinia as they indulged in multi-course meals that included everything from foie gras and rabbit to charcuterie and raw seafood. Not quite the Trimalchian feast of ancient satire, but close. Sound familiar?

In his book The Upside of Down, author Thomas Homer Dixon argues that the downfall of Rome can be attributed in part to a scarcity of food resources that eventually led to food crises throughout the empire. All the while, well-to-do Romans were still attempting to one-up each other via elaborate feasts as the general populace grew more and more unhappy with this widening gap — both in terms of wealth and attitude — between the rich and the poor.

And it is this crucial point in B.R. Myers’s article that may have been missed among all the vitriol and viciousness.

“Food writing has long specialized in the barefaced inversion of common sense, common language. Restaurant reviews are notorious for touting $100 lunches as great value for money,” he writes, pointing to the difficult-to-ignore issue that it’s hard to be a “foodie” in a climate where so many go without and when we’re in the midst of a global economic crisis that some consider the worst since the Great Depression.

Myers continues, “And in a time when foodies talk of flying to Paris to buy cheese, to Vietnam to sample pho? They’re not joking about that either.” Kwan, for her part, views these kinds of frenzied flights as no more than “white elites…assert[ing] a specific sense of self.”

Attempting to self-actualize and express your individuality through food can quickly lead to insufferable “poseur” behavior, as demonstrated here.

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“These individuals are lured to ‘authentic’ ethnic food,” she continues, “because it allows them to consume literally a symbolic embodiment of the ethnic ‘Other.’ Simply, this consumption is an attempt to align oneself with the ethnic Other and to realize the ‘Authentic Self.'”

Is this attempt to locate one’s “Authentic Self” in another culture’s food — or in multi-course, hours-long tasting menus — necessarily a bad thing? Kwan thinks so: “The consumption of ethnic food separates cultural symbols from the culture that creates them” and, in the process, “dangerously absolves elites from real dialogue with the Other.”

And the same can be said for the continued game of oneupmanship that many foodies find themselves playing with each other.

That pursuit food of as a mere carnal pleasure or as a status symbol can lead to a dangerous separation from real, crucial food issues at hand — serious issues like health and sustainabliity. If all that we, as foodies, concentrate on is the new hot chef in town or the ultra-expensive kaiseki dinner we ate in Tokyo, we’re missing the risotto for the rice.

That’s not to say that people shouldn’t continue to express themselves via food. After all, it’s as much a valid art form as sculpture, painting or poetry. But would it kill us to be less pretentious about it?

I ran into my friend Sharon at the new City Hall Farmers Market today and I mentioned to her – and my mother, who’d come with me – that this whole “eating on $20″ thing wasn’t as difficult as expected. My mother chalks it up to the fact that I keep a somewhat well-stocked pantry now.

Sharon said that she wasn’t surprised I wasn’t encountering any difficulty; the real challenge, she said, would be eating off only the stockpiled pantry goods. That’s certainly a challenge for another week, to be sure. We’ll call it Hurricane Survival Week. Or Zombie Apocalypse Survival Week. Whichever I can find better art for.

This is what I made last night for dinner. As with my first meal, it made such a large quantity that I could — in theory, at least — eat on it for the rest of the week. As usual, I didn’t follow a recipe. I made this up based on what I had on hand. I hate recipes.

But if you want to try this for yourself, it makes an impressive cold salad/entree that’s tasty and moderately healthy at the same time. Sub in chicken breasts for my beloved chicken thighs if you want to go that extra healthy mile. (Boring.)

I marinated two little chicken thighs in a mixture of olive oil, rice wine vinegar, Sri Racha (a/k/a rooster sauce), orange zest, orange juice from half an orange, a few dashes orange bitters and salt and fresh black pepper to taste. I baked them in my little copper skillet (because all my baking dishes are way too large) at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, then let the chicken cool while I cooked up some orzo, wilted some spinach in the heat of the steam from the boiling pot and threw some frozen soybeans in at the end of the orzo’s cooking time to defrost them.

I strained the whole mess, shredded the now-cool chicken and threw it all together. I poured some more rice wine vinegar and rooster sauce on top (not to much) and mixed it all up with a little more kosher salt. I diced the other half of the orange and threw it in for color and flavor. Added a few sunflower seeds for crunch and DONE.

Seriously. Easy as sin. Day three done. Day four and promises of kippers lay ahead!